Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

With the Harper Collins book Management by Baseball: The
Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field coming
out in May, I've changed the business end of how y'all book me for presentations and workshops. I
signed with Harper Collins' own Speakers Bureau. It helps
organizations I work with because the Speakers Bureau can handle
some of the logistics for them more cleanly than we could before.
It also simplifies my life because it aligns my speaking
scheduling with our efforts on the new book. Finally, a special
bonus: the team (Julie & Gary) is very cool, and enchilada
maximo Gary Reznick pitches the old horsehide in a semi-pro
league -- so when I field the MBB team, I already have a starter
recruited.

The talent is
the product: The national pastime's wisdom for
staffing, mentoring, improving and, when you have to,
cutting, employees.

There's no
"I" in "Team", but there are an
"M" & an "E". Baseball's
lessons in self-awareness and the importance of
overcoming emotions in managing.

Coping with and
initiating change: Lessons from the Man Who Invented
Babe Ruth.

Whatever Doesn't Make
You Stronger Kills You and other essential baseball
lessons for organizations in competitive lines of work.

Lessons from [pick a
team]. You pick a Major League team, and I'll put
together a set of management lessons that come from the
history and accomplishments of that team.

To arrange for some Management by Baseball at your event or
for a targeted workshop, contact the Harper Collins team at
212-207-7100, or visit their contact page.

1/28/2006 12:34:00 PM posted by j @ 1/28/2006 12:34:00 PM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Sutter's Mill-Stone: Herman Franks's Fallacious Fable

In the U.S., individuals' childhood life issues too
often become pillars of their management practice. Some people
are programmed to feel "it's not fair", and if they are
proactive, that urge may drive them to try to right wrongs. In
the more passive type personalities, that urge frequently drives
them to sit on the sidelines and wait for some unfairness to
happen, at which point they will point it out or complain or
whine about it. Because these people believe cognitively
that life is unfair/bad, when they hear info that asserts
something unfair happened, they are likely to jump on it because
it fits their world view. Sometimes in that particular case
that view is false, unsupported by the data or other forms of
reality, and since, more often than not, their complaints are
supported by data, they don't even bother to check to see if the
"news" is true.

This week something happened that was a perfect illustration
of the "it's not fair" chorus singing off-key.

Bruce Sutter was elected to Baseball's Hall
of Fame. Worse, a better candidate, Rich Gossage, wasn't, falling short again.
Amplifying the it's-not-fairness of the whole situation is that
at least one person with a vote suggested he's always
opposed Gossage but now that Sutter was in, he'd vote for
Gossage, which is akin to saying "I've always opposed the
froth-at-the-mouth Talibaptist maniacs in Iran, but now that our
ally in Baghdad is supporting them, I will, too".

A fair number of people have railed against the Sutter
installation citing the apocryphal story spread by Cub ex-manager
Herman Franks that:

Franks had developed the method of using Sutter only with
a lead and only for an inning.

In earlier seasons, Sutter had failed in the second
halves of seasons, probably from overuse, and Franks
learned to reserve/preserve the reliever for fewer, more
important, situations.

Sutter had therefore been the precursor to the classic
"Clean 9th" closer (term mine), coming
into games almost exclusively in a save situation, almost
exclusively at the beginning of the 9th inning.

There's at least one problem worth noting. Franks' story is
false on all three counts.

That apocryphal story is believed by many for good reason.
Bill James cites the story in his fine Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers. Paul
Votano reinforces it in his book Late and Close: A History of Relief Pitching.
In the discussion around Sutter HoF candidacy and his success,
many commentators, including my own favorite, Steven Goldman of
YES Network, have taken Franks' comments as frank. A small
handful support Franks and therefore Sutter (perhaps that really
they support Sutter and therefore Franks) while most oppose
Sutter cite Franks' alleged invention as an abomination and,
therefore, oppose Sutter's induction. Sutter is seen as some
fragile couple-of-batters trust fund kid who had decent stuff but
lucked into a cushy job.

These kind of problems occur beyond baseball all the time.
People hitch their energy to a story, either to support its moral
or oppose it, even when the story is a gilded telling of
something untrue, or once-true-now-passé. Detaching them from
that emotionally-triggered, behavior-shaping story is harder than
getting a $2 microbrew at a major league ballpark.

FACT: Franks never used
Sutter in a lead situation in a Clean 9th half or more of the
time.

Franks managed Sutter in Chicago from 1977-1979. If this
evolutionary innovation story was true, the actual pitching lines
for their final year together would reflect this. It doesn't.

Here's a key indicator, a chart that shows how many innings
Sutter pitched in each of his appearances in 1979:

Innings

~# of 1979 games

< 1

7

1

14

1-1/3

5

1-2/3

10

2

16

>
2

10

Franks was just as likely to use Sutter for more than an
inning as an inning or less. The mode average use was 2 innings,
the median 1-2/3. Sutter pitched 5 innings once. Bruce Sutter
wasn't the Woman of Kleenex, (repoz...you
must read that link) the foil to Goose
Gossage's Man of Steel. He wasn't Gossage, but neither was he
Tony Fossas.

Sutter's effectiveness and swell career stats are not
a function of being coddled. In his last serious season of use,
closing for Whitey Herzog's 1984 St. Louis Cardinals:

Innings

~# of 1984 games

< 1

5

1

15

1-1/3 or 1-2/3

10

2

29

2-1/3
or 2-2/3

6

3+

6

Median and mode average for appearance length was 2 innings.
If anything, it's possible that he could have had a longer
successful career if Herzog hadn't gotten him into 71 games where
he notched 122 innings (and I don't know how many times Herzog
warmed him up without putting him in a game once warmed).

Someone with better Retrosheet tools who wanted to could build
a chart like this for every season Sutter labored, but a quick
glance says the others would show a pattern similar to 1979.
Sutter was simply not a Clean 9th, quick-in-quick-out guy. Others
invented that rôle -- not Franks with Sutter.

FACT: The stats don't
indicate Sutter wore down in the second half of his seasons with
Franks..except for the last season in which Franks alleged he was
using him differently.

In 1977, Sutter was flat out fantastic. July and August were
brilliant, and even if you pour his crappy October game into
September and he still has a Baserunner/9 of 11.2 and an ERA
under 3.00.

In 1978, he was truly fine in July and truly poor in both
August and September. Franks didn't throw Sutter out there any
less. This one season is where he flagged in August and never
perked up.

In 1979, the year Franks allegedly managed him for lesser
first half use to preserve the reliever, Sutter didn't show up
until after the 11th game of the season. In April, Franks used
him less than he had the year before (over 11 fewer games, so
perhaps no different per game), in May he actually used him more
inninings and the same number of games as he had in '78, and then
in June, the same number of games and innings both. In the second
half of 1979, he used Sutter in more games and more innings than
he had in the "lesson learned" 1978.

It's clear that in terms of games, total innings, or length of
appearance, Franks never markedly altered his use of Sutter. And
again, Sutter was not the poster boy for the "Clean
9th" closer. Sutter has become a lightning rod for the
"it's not fair" folk -- the actual career has been
distorted by the untrue (probably not malicious, just not
verified) claims of a manager, the fact that bullpen use has been
dis-optimized by lazy managers and players seeking comfort in
highly prescribed rôles, the pursuit of a univerally-accepted as
goofy statistic, the save, and finally, the idea that somehow
he's being held up to Rich Gossage as an either/or Ahura Mazda
Less-Filling-Tastes-Great duality totem on which to beat 5/9ths
time. Ridiculous.

I have a research paper on what I believe
to be the actual origin of the Clean 9th closer. I'll run that in
some form in a different forum later.

BEYOND BASEBALL
The same sort of story distorts non-baseball organizations
regularly.

A friend of mine was working with a software company that had
their main product upgraded annually, always near the beginning
of each year. Technical support demand always went up temporarily
as a result. The people who worked in techncial support were
going nuts, because even though the company knew they were going
to have this predictable demand surge every year, they wouldn't
hire temps to sub for people who could do support or hire temp
support agents. Morale was rock-bottom in support and in customer
service (the people who got to hear the customers complain).

Management wouldn't try to hire any temp help. The
"reason", actually a creation myth, was that because
the software company had a contract to develop custom add-ons for
their main product specifically for a customer that was a defense
contractor, that everyone working in the company was required to
have a security clearance, and because it routinely took about
four months to get one, it was not feasible for the company to
hire any temporary staff. Everyone thought this was terribly
unfair, one of those insurmountable problems, like Soviet
Communism or the IMF that even though everyone knew it was a
terrible abusive failure, we somehow just had to learn to live
with and say "it's not fair" whenever we thought about
it or talked about it.

My friend was skeptical, so he started nosing around trying to
find where this draconian regulation was invented. Not,
certainly, but the Defense Department. I got to collaborate with
my friend on searching out the citation. Here's what we found.

The human resources department had hired an expensive
contractor to research what security requirements they needed to
apply and to whom once they started developing for the weapons
customer. The contractor had called someone at the customer's
legal department. The client's paralegal stated a truth, that
everyone who worked at the weapons customer had to have a
clearance. The contractor took that back to our company as a
requirement. They instituted it, and it sat unquestioned for four
years.

There was so much instituional inertia and fear of letting
this unfairness go ("what if they make the rule
that we have to but we've already changed it?") that it took
two more years and untold dollars and customer ill-will before
they actually changed the requirement.

People who see the world through "it's not fair", if
they're passive, can come close to sabotaging the very fairness
they crave. The best start to changing that is examining the
basis for the unfairness, never with the assumption that it's an
insurmountable given, that the story of why it has to be
is true, but asking the skeptical questions and following up
until, like a good historian or ethnographer, you know enough of
the truth to accept or spike the story.

Don't let you cognitive setting affect the way you make
decisions or view others. There's plenty of unfairness out there,
just not as much as people are programmed to see.

1/11/2006 08:36:00 PM posted by j @ 1/11/2006 08:36:00 PM

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Mets' Minaya Masters the Meat -- May Be Mutilating the Potatoes

Most decisions a manager faces are Meat & Potatoes, the
big core issues and the smaller supporting ones. Today, we'll
delve into the starchy world of Potatoes. You can't handle all
supporting decisions the same way simply because they are
relatively small, because some smaller-resource questions are
easy to adjust once made and others are hard to redirect.

Most managers deal with both the same way, to their detriment
and their organization's, too.

The clever and always-interesting baseball columnist Tim
Marchman this week described the off-season personnel
decisions of New York Mets G.M. Omar Minaya. It looks like a case
study in the consequences of not distinguishing between the two
kinds of Potatoes decisions.

The most important thing
for the general manager of a baseball team as rich as the
Mets to do is to get the big calls right. In baseball, as in
life, the most important benefit of money is that it allows a
margin of error. A plutocrat who loses $1,000 playing the
horses quickly withdraws another $1,000 from the bank and
gambles again; an everyman who does the same might not eat
for a while. Much the same is true of rich and poor baseball
teams. Carlos Delgado is a great player, but the Mets can
afford to bet that he's not about to do a Mo Vaughn
impression in a way the Cleveland Indians can't.

This being so, our plutocrat cannot afford to make a habit of
wadding up cash and throwing it in the gutter for laughs.
Soon enough, he'll regret the lack of cash, even if it only
means that he can only afford gold hubcaps instead of
platinum ones. And baseball teams cannot give away good
players for no reason; they'll come to regret it.

The Mets, like all teams with serious resources, face a small
handful of issues that need addressing and can be addressed. This
off-season, they have an excess of starting outfielders and are
looking for some serious bullpen help. The outfielder who makes
the best trade-bait was Mike Cameron, a stunningly capable
defender in centerfield who has sporadically put up serious
offensive numbers but is recovering from vision problems that
limited his plate effectiveness. The pitcher who would provide
the most attractive trade-bait is Jae Seo who, in 14 starts last
season, finally put up fine numbers (10 baserunners per 9
innings, 3.7-to-1 K-to-BB ratio, 8 of his 14 starts were really
good and only 3 really bad). This came after a couple of years of
lukewarm performance. It's not a given he'll continue to pitch he
way he did in 2005, ergo his trade value is not guaranteed to
ever be as high again. Both players are the kind who can light up
an optimistic buyer who imagines they are getting the services of
the best production each has had in their career.

You'd think each of these talents would be good lures to swap
and Minaya worked out deals for both. Marchman thinks the Mets
fared poorly in the swaps.

Seo emigrated to the Dodgers for the somewhat more evolved but
somewhat less promising Dodger reliever Duaner Sánchez (12
baserunners per 9 innings, 2-to-1 K-to-BB ratio, in 79
appearances). The heavy workload of 79 games is probably an asset
not a fear factor, since the Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson is
known as the best analyst of body stress for pitchers...the
regime Sánchez is moving to is protective of his health.

The Mets yielded Cameron to San Diego for their
excess outfielder/first baseman, Xavier Nady. Unlike Cameron,
Nady hasn't accomplished a lot yet, but he's going to have his
age-27 season in 2006 (Bill James's and others' studies indicate
batters tend to peak at age 27 or 28, so the Mets potentially own
both those years and while Nady has been a poor outfielder with
sharp platoon splits, his stats against right-handed pitchers
have improved. But the Mets had no urgent need for either an
outfielder or first baseman so Marchman believes this was an
unecessary distraction to their core needs.

¿So why did Minaya end up with these deals that disappointed
Mets fans who'd hoped to see desireable assets traded for better
fits?

POTATO MASHERMarchman thinks Minaya is one of those decisionmakers
that, faced with the Potatoes, resolves them as quickly as
possible. Always. Even if they're decisions that come with sticky
long-term consequences. As I stated earlier, most managers
resolve all Potatoes decisions the same way whether they have
long-term stickiness or not. They either agonizie over every
minor detail as though the Fate of Western Civilization Hangs in
the Balance, or take the tack Marchman thinks Minaya is holding
to (quick resolution, move on to next). As Marchman wrote:

You would think that a GM
with a Gold Glove center fielder with 30-home run power and a
cheap young starter coming off a season in which he rang up a
2.59 ERA would sit back, let the market come to him and fill
some holes. That's not Minaya. It's clear that once he gets
an idea in his head, whether it be, "I must trade Mike
Cameron," or, "I must trade Jae Seo to improve the
bullpen," he reaches a point at which he just wants to
move on to the next order of business rather than wait until
some minimal standard of acceptability is met.

This is the downside to the decisiveness everyone finds so
appealing when it nets a player like Pedro Martinez, and it
leads to thoughts like, "I must have Carlos Delgado, and
I'm not waiting out the Marlins over some Triple-A pitcher,
because another team might swoop in and grab him." Which
is fine in the isolated instance - but when it leads to the
team losing significant talent in every trade it makes, it
becomes a problem.

A resource-rich organization like the Mets, which had already
addressed its Meat issue (acquiring Carlos Delgado as their first baseman,
simultaneously replacing their weakest offensive shortcoming and
adding a top performer) had only these side issues to mess with.
Personnel decisions like these have longer-term effects, and one
can't afford to toss them off as though they are a decision to
pick a manufacturer for one batch of Bat Night giveaways. Even
well-endowed organizations don't have surpluses that are in
demand all the time.

I'm not sure these deals will end up being losers for the Mets
-- they won't be losers even if Seo pitches well or Cameron makes
a comeback because, as John Schuerholtz believes, part of a
deal's success is the antagonist's success -- a win-win
guarantees goodwill in future dealings. And I think the Mets may
find utility in a relief pitcher who can appear in half the
team's games and a once-highly touted talent entering his age-27
and -28 seasons. But Marchman's observation of Minaya's giddyup
is true either way and a lesson worth noting.

Do you dither over small decisions? Do you not have the
interest in a little wait-and-see on the Potatoes issues that
have longer-term consequences?